'Pragmatic Palestinian' Draws Road Map to Peace

By CLYDE HABERMAN

Published: December 23, 2001

JERUSALEM, Dec. 21—
For centuries, the Nusseibeh family of Jerusalem has held the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built on the sites where tradition says Jesus was crucified and entombed.

Long ago in this fractious land, it was decreed that this honor would go to the Nusseibehs and another Muslim family because Christian denominations kept fighting among themselves -- and still do sometimes -- over matters as mundane as who got to sweep which part of the church floor. It would be wiser, it was decided, to give the doorkeeping assignment to Muslims.

The question in Jerusalem now is whether a modern Nusseibeh holds a different kind of key, one that could conceivably open an exit door leading Israelis and Palestinians away from the deadly trap that has held them through 15 months of venomous conflict.

This Nusseibeh, first name Sari, says it is long past time to ''start the movement back to reason,'' to ''slowly climb the ladder from the political quagmire of hatred, enmity and senselessness we find ourselves in.''

Mr. Nusseibeh is the Palestinians' political representative in Jerusalem, a post that he has held for less than three months and that carries virtually no power. That much was made clear this week when he tried to hold a post-Ramadan reception for foreign diplomats in the walled Old City. Instead, he was detained briefly by the Israeli police.

Jerusalem is nothing if not a symbol-minded city. What Mr. Nusseibeh insisted had been intended as an innocent gathering was, to the Israeli government, a subtle attempt by an appointee of Yasir Arafat to challenge Israel's sovereignty over the entire city. The police stopped him cold.

But even if he lacks real power, Sari Nusseibeh now has an important bully pulpit, and he has chosen to use it to promote ideas that he believes offer Palestinians and Israeli a way out of their mess.

For now, his thoughts are mostly distinguished by their lack of appeal to almost anyone in authority on either side. But that can change, he said.

Israelis as well as Palestinians are beginning to pay attention, partly because he qualifies as the kind of ''pragmatic Palestinian'' with whom people around Prime Minister Ariel Sharon say they would rather deal than with Mr. Arafat.

At 52, he has a quiet, scholarly manner befitting a philosophy professor and college president educated at Oxford and Harvard. But he does not lack political skills, and he can say that he once stood in the trenches, having spent time in Israeli jails for his leadership role in the Palestinian uprising of the late 1980's.

In fact, Mr. Nusseibeh is the kind of moderate Palestinian who turns off -- even scares off -- both the Palestinian extremists who plan suicide bombings and the no-compromise forces on the Israeli political right. ''If he is a moderate,'' said Zeev Boim, the parliamentary leader from Mr. Sharon's Likud Party, ''he is also dangerous.''

Mr. Nusseibeh's central idea is that Israelis and Palestinians must each give up some of their most cherished dreams, painful as that may be.

For Israel, he says, it means sharing sovereignty in Jerusalem, a concept that was accepted by the previous Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, but that Mr. Sharon dismisses as absolutely unacceptable. The Israelis, Mr. Nusseibeh says, must also return to the narrower (most Israelis would say perilous) borders that they had before the 1967 Middle East war, taking with them 200,000 fellow citizens who have settled along hilltops of the West Bank and beachfronts of the Gaza Strip.

That much is familiar territory. These have been Palestinian demands for a long time. But Mr. Nusseibeh in the past few months has ventured onto new ground by saying that Mr. Arafat and the Palestinian Authority must surrender their claim to a ''right of return.'' That proclaimed right would allow Palestinian refugees and their descendants, perhaps as many as four million people, to move back to homes they lost in 1948 when Israel was created.

Israelis fear that a flood of Palestinians into their country of 6.5 million would end the Jewish state as they know it. Mr. Nusseibeh understands that worry.

''If we do not do this,'' he said in English, referring to his position on Jerusalem, borders and refugees, ''we will not reach a two-state solution. And if we do not reach a two-state solution now, both of us are headed for something that neither side will find itself happy in having, namely a state of affairs in which Jews and Arabs are intermingled, in which there is no Jewish state really, and there is no Arab state.''

His stand on the right of return broke a Palestinian taboo, and it has produced such strong criticism among Palestinians that some wonder if his life might be in danger. In reaction, Mr. Nusseibeh offered to resign, but Mr. Arafat said no.

Despite his years of political activism, Mr. Nusseibeh largely disappeared from public view after the 1993 Oslo peace agreement, which gave rise to the Palestinian Authority. Some have said that perhaps he wanted to keep his distance from an administration that seemed disaster-prone.

But the situation changed when the leading Palestinian figure in Jerusalem, Faisal Husseini, died in May after suffering a heart attack. Mr. Arafat turned, perhaps inevitably, to someone who, like Mr. Husseini, was a scion of one of the city's venerable Arab families.

Technically, Mr. Nusseibeh represents the Palestine Liberation Organization, not the Palestinian Authority, which Israel forbids to operate in Jerusalem. But Israeli officials consider all that a polite fiction, and they regard him as a stalking horse for Mr. Arafat. During the dispute over the Old City reception this week, Mayor Ehud Olmert of Jerusalem asserted that Mr. Nusseibeh's real intention was to give ''the appearance of two mayors of two municipalities.''

Granted, ''it could be looked on as a political event,'' Mr. Nusseibeh said a few days later. ''Anything you do is politics. But some things are innocuous and peaceful and some things are dangerous.''

Dangerous, he said, is the way that Palestinians and Israelis have demonized one another. Each, he said, has been blind to the other's history and aspirations.

One sensitive point for Israelis is the way Palestinians have, with increasing vehemence, rejected a Jewish historical connection to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

''Whoever says that is blind to history,'' Mr. Nusseibeh said. ''It's totally absurd to deny Jewish history in this land -- the deep connections, emotional, historical, existential.''

Then, too, he said, ''it is equally absurd'' to deny that Christians and Muslims have connections as well.

''Anybody who doesn't see the full richness and variety of the various religions and cultures in the very special geographic region is totally uneducated basically,'' he said. ''It's a reflection of ignorance, and can only cause provocation and widen the gulf.''

It is ''possible that it's too late'' to dissolve the enmity between the two peoples, Mr. Nusseibeh said in his president's office at Al-Quds University in eastern Jerusalem. From his windows, he can glimpse the golden cupola of the Dome of the Rock shrine, so close that one can almost reach out and touch it.

''But even if it is too late,'' he said, ''the effort is well worth undertaking, because one never knows, and one always has hope.''

Photo: Sari Nusseibeh, right, the Palestinian representative in Jerusalem, with Yossi Sarid of the Israeli opposition. (Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times)